You Will Be Mine by Natasha Preston

You know those days when life just springs {HUGE} things on you? Yeah, that was my day yesterday, but I still managed to get some reading done {and that’s an exciting post in the near future!} and not lose my head completely, so I call it a win. That’s why I figured You Will Be Mine would be the perfect book to showcase someone having a really, really, REALLY bad time.

Title: You Will Be Mine {304 pgs.}

Genre: YA Thriller

Publication Date: February 6, 2018

Summary:

ROSES ARE RED
VIOLETS ARE BLUE
WATCH YOUR BACK
I’M COMING FOR YOU

Lylah and her friends can’t wait to spend a night out together. Partying is the perfect way to let loose from the stress of life and school, and Lylah hopes that hitting the dance floor with Chace, her best friend, will bring them closer together. She’s been crushing on him since they met. If only he thought of her the same way…

The girls are touching up their makeup and the guys are sliding on their coats when the doorbell rings. No one is there. An envelope sits on the doormat. It’s an anonymous note addressed to their friend Sonny. A secret admirer? Maybe. They all laugh it off.

Except Sonny never comes home. And a new note arrives:

YOUR TURN

Review

College students Lylah, Sienna, Charlotte, Sonny, Isaac, and Chace only want to break loose and have a fun night at the beginning of the Valentine’s season {oh yes, that’s a thing around here}. Before leaving their house, Sonny, the lothario, receives a sinister note, and they toss it over their shoulders, because trying to figure out which scorned girl wrote it would take them all night.

But when Sonny doesn’t come home the next day, Lylah worries. And the notes don’t stop once they find do finally find Sonny. Having lost her parents only a few years earlier, Lylah is the most adamant in wanting to find the anonymous note leaver and move on her with her life. But life isn’t as simple as that, and a killer is on the loose, hunting Lylah and her friends in a twisted game of cat and mouse.

Lylah really only wanted to worry about her massive crush on Chace and the fact that her overbearing brother Riley is pressuring her to come home for the anniversary of her parents’ death. She wants to be a normal college student, not someone having to constantly look over her shoulder for someone with a large knife.

I’ve read a couple of other books by Natasha Preston, and it’s clear that she really likes to keep her readers on their toes. Her books remind me a lot of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books, with a scrappy heroine and her friends trying to evade a crazed killer whose motive is strange, at best. In You Will Be Mine, the entire group of friends points to former roommate Jake, a boy who left school a few months after being rejected by Lylah. That apparently equates to becoming a vindictive serial killer in their minds {how Lylah doesn’t have a huge head after all this, I don’t know}. It’s honestly a little troubling how quickly Lylah’s friends fall into the cobbled together idea that the killer is Jake. Then his family comes to clear his name – even though Jake is missing and has been a little weird the last few months – and things get even more muddied.

You Will Be Mine is a fun thriller that keeps you hurtling toward the end to figure out who the killer really is. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without faults. Some parts feel rushed, and Lylah is kind of a big worrier. Obviously, she should be, but she does a lot of yelling and crying and freaking out. It’s not helpful, Lylah, let me tell you. Her friends are trying not to freak out that people are dying around them, that they have police tailing their every move, that their entire school is talking about them, and Lylah running around playing detective is not what they need. I spent most of the book sighing and asking her why she is determined to make this harder for the detectives.

But then I guess it wouldn’t be a very interesting story if the main character sat on her bed patiently and waited for the detectives to solve the case, would it?

If you’re looking for a quick YA thriller and are also a fan of R.L. Stine and Cyn Balog, I’d pick You Will Be Mine. Valentine’s is coming up, and if you’re not into that holiday {really, though, we’re not all Kirsten Cohen}, this is definitely the book that you want to grab.